Zoodles with fresh tomato sauce (recipe)

I mentioned early this week, that we’ve been making some big food changes at home. This dinner is gluten free and dairy free. Before trying any gluten free pastas, I wanted to try making vegetable noodles first. Spaghetti is one of those foods that most kids just love, and it turns out my kids love veggie noodles just as much! Go on say it…Zoodles! Zucchini Noddles = Zoodles. Isn’t it fun to say?!

I did the research on vegetable spiralizers, and found that the Paderno brand vegetable spiralizer was the way to go, we bought ours on Amazon.

I have to admit…it’s so fun to make oodles of zoodles! To see the big long noodles of zucchini come through the other side is so neat. They’re so long too!

There are different ways to cook zoodles, but I just treated them like regular spaghetti pasta and cooked them for a short time in salted water. I undercooked them and finished the cooking by tossing them around in the pan with the tomato sauce.

Have you ever made a tomato sauce using fresh tomatoes? If not, you must! Especially right now with all the fresh garden tomatoes in season. You just can’t beat a fresh tomato sauce this time of year.

To blanch the tomatoes, score a small letter x to the bottom of the tomatoes and drop them into a pot of boiling water. Only leave them in the boiling water for a short time. When you remove the tomatoes from the water, let them cool on a cutting board. Once cooled, the skin should easily peel off.

Over a bowl, gently squeeze each tomato to release the seeds and juices along with the center segment to discard. You now will be left with just the meaty flesh of the tomatoes. Place them into a bowl and with an immersion blender or regular blender, blend until smooth or however texture you prefer.

In a pan on medium high heat, add a tablespoon of coconut oil and the thinly diced onions. At this time, you can add in the sausage rounds to brown in the pan if you’d like. Cook the onion until it’s translucent. Add the minced garlic to the hot pan and cook until you can smell the garlic. As soon as you can smell the garlic, add in the tomato sauce. Stirring for a short time. You can now add the zoodles to the sauce and toss them all around. You might need to cook off the excess liquid from the zoodles to reduce the sauce and intensify the flavor.

We also had corn on the cob with the zoodles and I just dropped the corn right into the same hot cooking water of the zoodles and it cooked up fast. I love dinners this time of year with everything in season. It’s the best!

You’ll have to try this recipe! Have you ever made “zoodles” at home? If so, how do you like to eat them?